


The Dignity of a Name

by idiom



Series: Focus. Commitment. Sheer will. [4]
Category: Dishonored (Video Games), John Wick (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, M/M, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-08
Updated: 2019-12-08
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:35:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21713083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idiom/pseuds/idiom
Summary: As John runs away from his life as a Whaler, he starts to feel his power diminishing... until the Outsider comes to him.—“I want to see you pushed to your limit, John.” The Outsider whispered against his lips. “I want to see what happens when you’re forced further than you ever thought you could go.”John turned bodily to face him this time, want still heavy in his gaze. As he moved to press another kiss to deep red lips, the Outsider whispered.“Come find me.”
Relationships: Santino D'Antonio/John Wick
Series: Focus. Commitment. Sheer will. [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1451776
Comments: 4
Kudos: 62





	The Dignity of a Name

**Author's Note:**

> Dishonored/John Wick Crossover: In which John is a disgraced Whaler and Santino is… something else.  
> Short and sweet. Characterization is basically mixed between Corvo/The Outsider and John/Santino.  
> This is probably my last John Wick fic until I magically get inspired again when the next movie comes out haha I had fun! :P

—

DUNWALL 

—

John broke into the abandoned apartment after blinking through an entryway gate with the last remnants of his mana. The house was boarded up, but he’d found a message left on the door for someone called Charon. Must have been the owner’s footman because apparently the previous resident had wanted the place taken care of and had given this man Charon vague instructions on where he could find the key. Lucky for John, the butler had never made it back through the plague-ridden streets for the note... or the key. 

John entered the house with ease and walked silently through the halls. The place clearly belonged to someone with money, but also a bit of an eclectic sense of taste. Eccentric bits and bobs filled glass cabinets and artistic renditions of Dunwall’s seaside landmarks covered the walls between portraits of people John could only guess were the owner and his family. 

There were a few rats in the lower halls but they hadn’t made it upstairs and these weren’t the plague swarms John had seen in other parts of the city. Still, John checked the house for weepers or mad survivors of the horrors beyond. Thankfully this place seemed like a little piece of sanctuary in the hellscape that Dunwall had become.

Collapsing into a chair, John sighed and removed his mask. He’d spend hours outrunning his former gang. The Whalers didn’t exactly support their members when they tried to leave. Daud had sicced them on him like wolfhounds. John had barely made it out of the Flooded District alive, but he’d eventually lost his pursuers among the city’s craggy rooftops.

Now, he could close his eyes. He could rest, even if it was just for the briefest of moments.

But sleep didn’t come.

There was something calling to him. 

No. Not calling. Singing?

That wasn’t it at all. It couldn’t be.

There was a strange sound. Just a strange sound. 

Hiding behind the walls. Whispering and crackling, like a fire underwater.

John opened his eyes. He stood and paced, listening, trying to figure out where the noise was coming from. 

On a strangely placed wall, there hung a painting and below it, John noticed an odd panel. Out of curiosity he fingered what he could tell was a hidden switch. The faint sound of gears and mechanisms echoed behind the wall as soon as he pressed it. 

As the wall slid aside, a sudden burst of colour poured out. Violet fabric surrounded what could only be described as a shrine. Runic whale bones sat in a place of honor upon a pedestal surrounded by long since burned out candles. Next to this, there was a painting.

The figure depicted was eerily known to John. Stunning and severe. His well-rendered black eyes stared out from the portrait, watching, so very alive despite their lack of a soul.

The room suddenly became very cold. As John stepped inside, a chill rolled over him. It was as if he’d been transported from the warm candle lit safehouse to another realm, where despite his surroundings nothing was real. 

He was in the barren Void... and yet everything looked the same.

“I know you’re here,” John whispered into the grey abyss. “Show yourself.”

“John Wick.”

When he turned, the room that had barely been a closet expanded before him. The floorboards splintered into shards as stone platforms rose out of the darkness. Shadows swam through the strangely distant air like impossible creatures in the sky.

There was someone with him now.

“Look at you, John. Running away from your past life,” the smooth voice sounded before a figure materialized. The man in the portrait now stood corporeal before him. “As if it would be that easy.”

“You…” John murmured.

The figure tilted his head to one side, his dark curls shifting over his pale forehead. “Me? Who am I, then?”

“The one in the Void. The Outsider.”

The stranger smiled. He paced around John, towards the shrine, not responding apart from that. 

“You know,” he said after a pause, “The man who raised this shrine in my name is called Winston... he’s not very interesting, an old man set in his ways. He begged... but I never did appear to him.”

John frowned. “So why appear now? Why me?”

As he turned slowly, the Outsider’s smile widened. It shined enigmatically in his black eyes. “You’re special, John. You’ve gained my interest.”

John stared at the Outsider. He was horrifying, yet beautiful. A creature who existed only in this Void beyond the world. 

John opened his mouth to speak, but suddenly realized he didn’t know how to address the darkly being appearing and disappearing in a crackle of magic right before his eyes. The Abbey of the Everyman called him the Outsider, but... 

“Do you have a name?”

“No one has asked me that before,” the Outsider sighed. “I suppose I did once, but it’s been four thousand years since that life was taken from me.” 

“Do you want me to call you... something...?” John asked. A name… it was such a basic dignity, though, perhaps gods had no need for them.

The Outsider again cocked his head to one side. His smile was odd, different, lacking the lofty air that had been there before. 

“I don’t want anything, John.” He said this, but then gave pause for a moment. His black eyes seemed to trace John’s body with a slow gaze.

“Well, there maybe something.” His smile returned to normal, along with the strange gleam in his eyes. “I am the Outsider. Call me what you’d like. It won’t make a difference.” 

The Outsider stepped closer, his black eyes staring straight through him. John felt like this being was looking into his very soul.

“Leaving the Whalers will make you soft,” the Outsider murmured. “I can already see it draining you.” 

“Then what should I do? Stay?” John shook his head. “I wouldn’t even make it back to the Flooded District.”

The Outsider hummed, an amused sound. “That is a predicament, isn’t it? Though it does make sense that you wouldn’t exactly be welcomed back with open arms.”

“I won’t go back,” John uttered, shaking his head. “No more Whalers. No more Daud.” 

“Will you still fight? For your survival? Your city? Your future?”

John clenched his fists. “I don’t have his power to fight anymore.” 

His nearness to Daud, the leader of the Whalers, was the only thing that he’d been able to draw power from. Now, having run away and used up the last of his mana, he was nothing.

However, upon hearing this, the Outsider simply huffed and soon after a strange smirk curled his lips. 

“Why do you think I’m here?”

Suddenly, John could feel a presence in his mind, magic pushing against his thoughts. The Outsider was in his head, not forcing himself in, but rather asking. Bidding him to take what was being offered.

Closing his eyes, John accepted. 

As soon as he did, a strange burning sensation consumed his left hand. He lifted his palm to see the skin flaring red as if it were burning up from the inside. He turned his hand. The magic faded and a mark was left emblazoned below his knuckles, a black tattoo. 

The Outsider’s Mark.

“This is my gift to you.”

John looked up from his hand to see the Outsider had blinked directly before him. Barely a breath away, his smiling black eyes were even more ominous. 

“How you use what I have given falls upon you.”

Unsure what to say, John parted his lips. He was about to voice something akin to gratitude when the words were stopped. The Outsider leaned into him, his lips suddenly descending upon John’s own.

A kiss from this man… no… this being… it was like being drawn into a watery abyss. John was drowning, held under the deep until he convulsed and shuddered. With passion, the Void took him. Horrific though it was, John found the sensation strangely addictive. He would drown again and again if it prolonged the caress of the Outsider’s lips on his. The gentle brush from such a powerful being was a torment with the promise of something equivocally unknown. 

The kiss broke when the Outsider disappeared and blinked behind John. The dragging of those red lips was soft over his neck, along his jaw, up to his ear. 

John turned his head to meet that black gaze once more. 

“I want to see you pushed to your limit, John.” The Outsider whispered against his lips. “I want to see what happens when you’re forced further than you ever thought you could go.”

John turned bodily to face him this time, want still heavy in his gaze. As he moved to press another kiss to deep red lips, the Outsider whispered. 

“Come find me.”

John closed his eyes and when he opened them, the Outsider was gone.

—

Weeks passed and John found himself as obsessed with the Outsider as any of his crazed followers. He travelled the world looking for any information he could find, notes, novels, literature. Eventually he even found rumoured ways to enter the Void. Along his path, the Outsider would find him, appear to him, but nothing felt like it had that first time. Their meetings were brief and the god always told him the same thing in the end:

“Come find me.”

When John heard about the Overseers’ attack on his old homebase and how it had been the betrayal of Daud’s right hand, Billie Lurk, that had caused the dissolution of the Whalers, John knew he could consider her an ally. It took some convincing, and he was fairly sure he now owed her a blood debt, but John was able to lure Billie to Karnaca to help him find the Outsider. Apparently, the Outsider had taken an interest in Billie as he’d done in John, though his interest in her was clearly... less benevolent. It seemed the Outsider wasn’t happy with how close they’d become.

“He took my arm, John,” Billie hissed as they sailed aboard her ship, the  _ Dreadful Wale _ , towards the mountainous region of Shindaerey Peak. “And my eye. And you know what they say...”

“An eye for an eye,” John muttered, finishing the saying for her. “But, he gave you power.”

“I don’t want it.” Billie shook her head. “Let’s find the bastard. If destroying him will make this all go away, then so be it.”

John didn’t reply.

There had to be another way. He wasn’t planning to kill the Outsider, but he couldn’t say the same for Billie.

—

KARNACA

—

Sneaking through a derelict quarry, John made it past the cult of the Outsider and around the creatures they’d become by staying in this place. He did not let the horror of the Void’s stone monsters stop him. He had not known the Outsider before his mark, but now with it he felt their connection. He was drawn towards the softly singing runes, the bone charms, the Void, but now the Outsider’s call was different. 

John knew he wasn’t like these cultists. He’d been… chosen.

Stealthily, John made his way unseen. The cultists were none the wiser as he stole their histories and artifacts. It was only when he found the recording, the message, the secret… then he knew he’d be able to find the Outsider. 

A hole in the world brought him into the Void. The Outsider was deep in the Void, a place called the Ritual Hold, watched over passive leviathan’s that circled the air overhead. 

John looked around. There were ghosts in this place, some familiar, some not, some he was sure he’d put there. He did not see the Outsider.

“Where are you?”

He didn’t get a response. Whatever power the outsider had used to first appear to him, he didn’t seem to have that power here in this place. 

John wandered further into the Ritual Hold only stopping when he reached the very centre of the Void. In this place, the Outsider was a figure trapped in stone. There was no god here. He was just a man. A man completely at John’s mercy.

A man with a name. 

“Santino...” John whispered, repeating the sounds he’d heard in that cultist’s recording. 

The name had power. The name made him human again.

As simple as that, the mythic demiurge, was gone. The Outsider was no more. The black faded from his eyes, like an oil slick bleeding away. 

Santino’s body was released from the stone. He stumbled forward into John’s arms, staring up at him. His pale green eyes were full of ages upon ages of knowledge and yet a startled sense of unknowing shone through. He’d been blind for so long, the power and the Void controlling him.

Now he was free.

“You have done something… impossible,” Santino whispered, still clinging to John. His long bound legs shook as he tried to stand. 

John held him close. Feeling Santino, the man he’d been looking for all these weeks, the one who had once inhabited or been inhabited by an ethereal being, in his arms felt different then the Outsider. It was… better. 

Real. 

John didn’t know what to say as he gazed into Santino’s grey-green eyes, so he simply looked back towards the portal and murmured, “I can get you out of here.”

—

THE DREADFUL WALE

— 

Waiting for them on the docks, Billie was now happily reformed with her eye and hand intact, but still clearly less than thrilled to have the Outsider aboard her ship. She didn’t care what name he was going by now; she still saw the monster who’d pulled her into the Void and attacked her in a dream.

“He’s coming with us? What are we supposed to do with him?” she said, shaking her head when John came back onboard carrying the Outsider’s mortal meat suit at his side. “If we try to walk back into Dunwall or Serkonos with him, the Abbey of the Everyman will hunt us down like rats.”

“Just get us somewhere they won’t bother us,” John replied.

They sailed from Karnaca towards Morley. The north eastern Island was still part of the Empire, but their separatist moods and consistent rebellions meant they could probably find some peace among the people there, even though they might still have to watch out for the Abbey’s Overseers.

“You’ll be safe in Morley,” John promised. He and Santino were alone in his room on the lower deck of the ship. 

Santino was pale and wan, but he was so very much alive and happy to be so. He looked at John with his green eyes and smile.

“How can you be sure?” he asked. “This world is dark and full of danger. I’ve seen it all.” His grin was still in place when he closed his eyes. “I can’t see it anymore. But it’s all out there still. There’s more than just you lurking in the shadows, John.”

Leaning back against the wall, John nodded a slow show of understanding. 

“I’ll keep you safe.”

To that Santino’s somber smile widened.

“I’ve seen you. Seen what you can do,” he said. Opening his eyes, he looked to John. “So I know that yours is a promise I can trust.”

John huffed out an amused sound as he turned away. They were sitting on his bed, side by side in the tiny closet of a room Billie had afforded him. 

Santino reached up, turning his cheek with the tips of John’s fingers, drawing his dark gaze back towards him. He traced the roughness of the man’s chin and the angle of his jawline before tilting his head.

“I knew a man like you, John,” Santino whispered, their lips a breath away as he moved in closer. “Four thousand years ago. It’s impossible, don’t you think?”

John inhaled sharply as he replied: “Nothing ever is.”

Santino chuckled. The sound was light and wonderful, devoid of that dark amusement that used to echo through the Void.

When the former-god’s laughter died down, they sat for a moment in silence. Their eyes met, then dropped, tracing each other’s lips before gradually they both leaned in. 

Santino was clearly starved for human contact. His movements were unpracticed, but perfectly seductive. Delicately, he pulled John in, tempting him with every move to touch him, hold him closer, kiss him deeper.

John didn’t need enticing; he was beyond tempted. He knew by the end of the night they would break several Strictures. Wandering gaze, restless hands, rampant hunger, wanton flesh. Yes. Before the dawn broke on the watery horizon they’d both be willful heathens. 

The Outsider might have been gone, but John would worship his form still. He traced Santino’s pale skin, carefully pulling away the restrictive black jacket he wore and unbuttoning the white shirt underneath. 

“I remember this,” Santino sighed against his lips as his skin was revealed. He took John’s hand and traced it down the center line of his body, over surprisingly unmarred flesh. “I remember everything.”

John didn’t know if he was talking about the first kiss they’d shared back when he’d received the mark, or if Santino was talking about another memory, something from many millennia ago. Was it the memory of a long lost lover? Or the memory of what had been done to him?

Again, John traced the dip down the centre of Santino’s chest, between his ribs.

Santino grit his teeth and hissed before claiming John’s lips in yet another kiss.

John laid Santino out on the bed, pressing his body between the spread of his long legs. They moaned into each other’s mouths. The springs of the tiny twin bed creaked, hiding their panting breaths. The creaking was in turn hidden by the groaning of the boat rocking against the waves as they sailed.

It had been so long since John felt a connection like he did with Santino, he couldn’t even remember the last time anyone had sparked his passions so fervently. Santino was a god to him, still, even now, spread out and laid back on the springy frame of a damp ship mattress. 

When they made love, it was gentle, unhurried, careful, far from what John was used to, but seeing Santino shiver and shake beneath him as they rode out the pleasure made something inside him sing. Every thrust, every movement drew out soft moans and gentle groans until the belly of the ship was filled with sounds like whale song. John would have been embarrassed by his own pleasured grunts as he arched over Santino and sunk in deeper and deeper, but the sensations coursing through him blocked out any other feeling.

“John, I’m… don’t stop,” Santino breathed. He arched back until his spine curled up off the mattress. His body pressed into John’s, the line of his cock trapped between their abdomens, twitching from the friction of their rocking bodies.

John rolled his hips, dragging his cock in long strokes in and out of Santino’s supple form. The man, once a god, was falling apart beneath him, undone once more just as he’d been when John broke him from his stone prison in the Void. Now, he was breaking him out of the cresting high, finally pushing him through the surface and bursting through into a sensual sea of gratification.

The climactic throb of pleasure hit them together, lashing through their bodies. They held each other close, Santino’s legs shaking against John’s sides, unable to keep the tight grip they’d had before as they vibrated from the rushing blood pounding through them.

John could feel his heart beating in his ears. His fingers gripped Santino’s hips, pulling him in, holding him close. He was so deep, filling Santino’s empty void with everything he had.

They remained like that, shaking in the aftermath of their lovemaking. It took many long, languid minutes for their breathing to even out.

—

Santino collapsed down onto the bed, his legs falling open and his entire body on display. He did not care. All he cared for was the man between his legs, his lover, his saviour.

John groaned as his strength seemed to return to him. He pressed wet kisses along the line of Santino’s chest, between his nipples and up his neck until their lips met. The kiss was soft and lazy, both too fucked-out for the frenzy of tongues and teeth that had come before.

“I’m not a god anymore, John,” Santino sighed as their kiss broke. He smiled softly as John went back to covering his body with the caress of his lips. “I am no longer a creature to be worshiped.”

John’s eyes flicked up to look at him, his eyes heavy and dark nearly as black as the Outsider’s gaze. With his lips brushing Santino’s, he whispered:

“I will always worship you.”

—

THE END

—


End file.
